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Comment by b0rsuk | Hacker News Reader

I used to like KDE and dislike Gnome, but by the time I switched to i3 I realized I don't care about traditional window managers. I used a lot of console anyway. Why wait for windows and icons to appear? I want animations and decorations to get out of the way. If I'm playing, it's usually fullscreen. When I'm working, I want to use as much screen as possible. i3 sounded radical at first, but when was the last time an animation or decoration helped you? I mean there are some rare cases, but it needs to be helpful for me to leave it enabled.

I now honestly believe mouse interfaces are overrated. They have their place in games and graphical applications. Anything that does NOT require precision is better done with a keyboard. The exception is websites. Mouse is used because it has very low learning curve and you can just click on stuff that interests you without thinking how to reach it.

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Well, I browse a lot of the web using my keyboard using either Vimium or Tridactyl. Together with i3, it feels like a totally different and pleasant experience.

Agreed, between vimium, Vim, and a window manager, I almost never have to actually touch my mouse. Keeps me in the zone a lot more.

Except for all the JS-heavy crap which refuses to work properly with keyboard navigation plugins. It's obviously an excellent idea to use a styled <div/> instead of a <button/>. For example, Grafana is nearly unusable without a mouse: try configuring a chart and see how far you'll get. These interfaces must present enormous problems for users who rely on accessibility features.

Oh for sure, I get insanely annoyed when I run across sites that have unnecessarily complicated JS for stuff as mundane as buttons, but cutting 90% of my mouse usage still makes my computer use a lot better.

Aren't tiling window managers the traditional ones?

The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation and is of course more difficult to implement. The earliest versions of Windows were also tiling only, which is thus the traditional way.

> The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation and is of course more difficult to implement.

I find it funny, because I would say I have seen more floating window manager, when I was browsing GitHub, so I assume it is also quite easy to create a new one from scratch. Such floating VMs usually have 200-1000 LOC and die after 1 month after initial commit. Recently, xwm has been on HN [0] and it is small in terms of SLOC. There is smaller one called tinywm[1]. When we would compare them to i3[2] and sway, we can see they have thousand times larger codebase but they also bring a lot more features.

I keep my fingers crossed for more sophisticated WMs like PaperWM[3], which is "tiled scrollable window manager" to take off. They might synthesize ideas from floating and tiling managers and provide a better tool to manage windows on a screen.

[0]: https://github.com/mcpcpc/xwm

[1]: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm

[2]: https://github.com/i3/i3

[3]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

> I find it funny, because I would say I have seen more floating window manager, when I was browsing GitHub, so I assume it is also quite easy to create a new one from scratch. Such floating VMs usually have 200-1000 LOC and die after 1 month after initial commit. Recently, xwm has been on HN [0] and it is small in terms of SLOC. There is smaller one called tinywm[1]. When we would compare them to i3[2] and sway, we can see they have thousand times larger codebase but they also bring a lot more features.

That is because the X11 server handles the drawing of windows over each other.

Older display protocols simply had no support for it.

Windows 1.0 was a tiling window manager!

https://www.lifewire.com/thmb/4_wxRAsOvukqwxpkQ-2SAZTx4ro=/2...

2.0 added floating windows

https://www.lifewire.com/thmb/qXTZ7Mk9cLKSc3wpEP2wK14oT8I=/1...

If we're going down that road, then no.

The Xerox Alto was the first GUI, and it used floating windows.

Sounds plausible.

Note there's a big trend of making fullscreen applications. Skype acts like you bought a computer just to run it. Slack wants it all. Gmail is crammed with icons and features and can't deal with half width screen. Media players have notions, they call your computer a library.

Instead, many applications subdivide themselves into smaller windows - for example IDEs.

It's as if people gave up arranging application windows. They alt-tab (switch) between fullscreen apps. Moving windows around is usually too much hassle. Unless you drag and drop some files from one folder to another, but even then many people prefer copy/paste.

I have configured i3 to be a bootleg version of PaperWM[0]. Everything tabbed by default. Alt+h & Alt+l switch windows in the current workspace and Alt+j & Alt+k switch workspaces. I can still flip to tiling mode if I need to see things side by side but I find myself rarely needing to. I have really poor vision so my use case is going to be different than most but this works super well for me. I'm only ever a couple keystrokes away from whatever I need to see.

[0]https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

> Aren't tiling window managers the traditional ones?

No, why should they? Traditional mainly means what is established custom, not just what comes first or later. Floating Window Managment is around for decades, since the earliest generations of GUIs and everyone is using them today by default. Tilling back in the early days was a neccesarity, not a choice, and it was replaced fast, making it the loser of development. Later development made it a viable alternative to floating, but at this point floating was already dominating.

> The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation

Kinda questionable. It seems MacOS had floating from the beginning. Windows was missing it in the first version, but added it in the second. But nur sure how widley used Windows was used at that time.

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